Author Recommendations for Latinx Heritage Month

Alexandra Villasante, author of The Grief Keeper: “We Are Not From Here is a book that will mark your heart. Jenny Torres Sanchez challenges us to feel, empathize and understand. A searing, necessary and ultimately beautiful book.”

Carlos Fuentes, author of Happy Families: “Machado is a miracle. . . . The most brilliant star in the sky of nineteenth-century Iberian-American novels.”

Julia Álvarez, author of Before We Were Free: “Latin American magical realism leaps over any borders and ends up in the barrio of Spanish Harlem. A love story, coming-of-age story, a mystery, a whodunit story, and ultimately a story of true love in the broadest sense.”

!Léelo en español!

Ana Castillo, author of The Guardians: “The Book of Emma Reyes is a diamond in the rough. It serves up, with the tastiness of street-vendor meats off a hot grill, the story of two sisters who grew up in unforgiving circumstances. If you are vegetarian, don’t worry: The spices, like the author’s exquisite memory for detail, will fill your imagination. For a while afterward you’ll wonder how it is that some children survive their childhood, and you’ll surely be thankful for your own.”

!Léelo en español!

Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban: “A lyrical, richly sensory novel about a group of renegade cantoras—slang for queer women—who claim a beach refuge during the worst years of the dictatorship in Uruguay, and beyond. Together they steal time from oppression of all kinds, unspooling the infinity of themselves. Pointedly relevant to our own dangerous age, Carolina De Robertis has gifted us a majestic work of song and imagination, a handbook to survival for us all.”

Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street: “When women tell stories, they are finally at the center of the page. When women of color write history, we see the world as we have never seen it before. In Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Ingrid Rojas Contreras honors the lives of girls who witness war. Brava! I was swept up by this story.”

!Léelo en español!

Julia Alvarez, author of Before We Were Free: “A classic. . . . This little book has made a great space for itself on the shelf of American literature.”

Juan Gábriel Vasquez, author of The Shape of Ruins: “A wonderful nightmare of a book: tender and frightening, disturbing but compassionate. Fever Dream is a triumph of Schweblin’s outlandish imagination.”

Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street: “Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart, believable in everything they said and did. How tragic that American letters hasn’t met these women of the West before, women who were here before America was America. And how tragic that these working-class women haven’t seen themselves in the pages of American lit before. Thank you for honoring their lives, Kali. I welcome them and you.”

Cristina Henríquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans: “What can I say about this novel? That it’s extraordinary, electric, heartbreaking, profound? There aren’t enough adjectives to describe how moved I was by the story of Ladydi and her friends, of their tragic lives and quiet fortitude in spite of a world that conspires against them. Maybe it’s enough just to say this: Prayers for the Stolen is the best book I’ve read in years.”